


Checking the Horizon

by screamlet



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Female Friendship, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-28 00:48:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/301913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/pseuds/screamlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lavinia has a proposition for Edith and the future. Set before series two, episode 8.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Checking the Horizon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zlot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zlot/gifts).



Someone knocks on Edith’s door one night while she’s writing in her journal. She looks at the bed around her and sees her feet as the lumps under the covers -- they had just gotten _warm_.

There’s another quiet knock and she sighs, gets out of bed, grabs her dressing gown, and opens the door.

For Lavinia.

“I’m sorry it’s so late,” she says in her quiet, near-whisper of a voice. “Could I come in?”

“Of course,” Edith says, more out of curiosity than hospitality. Mary, perhaps out of some misplaced guilt, has been the most welcoming Crawley sister to Lavinia, but Edith hasn’t shirked her duties either. Lavinia always seems much more cheered after she and Edith can catch a moment together, perhaps because Edith seems the only person in the family who thinks that Lavinia had some kind of life before Matthew.

Truth be told, it’s difficult to remember life before Matthew. She had twenty years of life without Matthew, Sybil had seventeen, and Mary more than she’d care to admit at this point, yet those years before him and the _Titanic_ ’s sinking seem so far off now, something unreal and saccharine out of Dickens.

Edith climbs back into bed to warm her feet and smiles, motions for Lavinia to join her.

“Isobel made me socks when she heard I would be staying here,” Lavinia says as she slips her bare feet under the covers. “I’m afraid they’re so... I don’t have the words for them, honestly, but I would be terrified to be caught outside my room with them on. They’re so. Blue.”

“Blue?”

“Pastel blue with little green accents,” Lavinia says, letting her polite veneer slip for a moment. “They are practical and wonderful, but I can see your mother’s face if she saw them and I’m not sure if she would laugh or cry.”

“Laugh, definitely,” Edith says as she laughs. “Mary and Sybil might suggest otherwise, but the rest of us do love a laugh, especially when ridiculous socks are involved.”

“Your grandmother might enjoy Isobel’s handiwork too much,” Lavinia adds.

“Granny is in a category all her own,” Edith says, and it doesn’t escape her notice that she can never even say _Granny_ without a note of marvel in her tone.

“So,” Lavinia says. She sits up a little and faces Edith on the massive bed, ensuring her feet are under the covers. She rubs them a little and looks off at some distant point rather than directly at Edith. It takes all of Edith’s willpower to stay patient and wait for Lavinia to gather herself when all she wants to do is shove her a little and yell, “Get on with it!”

Kindly, and politely, like a lady, of course.

“I can trust you, can’t I? To keep something in confidence?” Lavinia asks.

“Of course you can,” Edith says. She means it, too. She’s not invested in Lavinia’s marital saga in the slightest, so whatever gushing she must do about Matthew or her worries about Mary will stay with Edith, who will do her best to forget them as soon as Lavinia’s left the room.

“This concerns you, a bit, possibly a lot,” Lavinia says, drawing it out. “I... Matthew asked me when I would like to... he asked me to pick a date. I told him we should wait a bit longer.”

“Did you?” Edith asks. “But Dr. Clarkson said that he was fine, his recovery wouldn’t be undone as long as he continues his solicitor’s existence and doesn’t try very hard at anything much.”

“Now you added that last part yourself, Edith,” Lavinia laughs. “Major Clarkson would never disparage the social order as you have now.”

“I’m fortunate enough to be in the position to do so,” Edith says with a wave. “Why won’t you set a date? Mary and Granny aren’t scaring you off, are you? They won’t actually --”

“I don’t want to marry him,” Lavinia says firmly. “I think... I’ve had time to come to know Matthew, truly know him, and his family and all of you, and... this isn’t what I want.”

Edith can’t quite hide her wounded pride for a moment, but Lavinia catches that.

“Don’t take that the wrong way, I don’t mean all of you personally, but this life. It’s too close to what I’ve known for most of my life, and I thought... well, I thought when I married, it would be the start of something entirely new and different.” She rests her hand on the comforter and plays with the lace edge on Edith’s pillowcase. “Marrying Matthew would mean this. Downton. Forever. It isn’t for me.”

Edith looks at her face and the pain that it’s taking her to say this, to admit it to another person. She wants to ask _why her_ , why confide in Edith, why not just _escape_ and leave Matthew to Mary’s longing claws and desperate heart, but she stops herself and asks instead:

“What would you do instead?” Edith says it and her mouth stays open because the absurdity of their situation (and it is very much _their_ situation, a _lady’s_ situation) has become so real to her once again: marry Matthew (this Matthew or any of the Matthew’s in their world) or do _anything else in the world_.

Her mind has glimpsed tiny views of what an alternative to marrying a Matthew and living Downtonly ever after would be like, usually when in London for the season or when reading the newspapers after Father is done with them, but putting that in concrete terms -- how has that taken her so long?

“I would return to London and live in a flat,” Lavinia says. She looks into Edith’s face, swallows slightly, fixes her glance directly at Edith’s eyes. “I’ve discussed it with my father and uncle before, and they’re amenable to it. They -- it’s much more common for ladies to live alone before they marry in London, and to work, even.”

“Is it now?” Edith asks.

“Well, it’s not _very_ common, but it happened before the war, during the war, and now that the war’s over, it’s bound to become more common, Edith,” Lavinia says excitedly.

Edith wants it. She wants _that_. She wants London, friends of her own, purpose, real concerns to occupy her mind rather than updating the registry of available English bachelors and wondering who she would settle for when the time came. (She should have been more entertaining to Evelyn Napier when he was flirting with Mary all that time ago -- he was fine and wouldn’t have bothered a wife with much at all.)

Edith has to swallow, too, before she tries to force her way into this plan, Lavinia’s plan, Lavinia’s decision, Lavinia’s courageous vision.

“I want you to come with me,” Lavinia says. Her hand moves from the bed to clutch at Edith’s, picking it up off the bed and holding it close to her like her hand is the only thing keeping her from running out the door and jumping in the car, bound for London this very moment. “My family’s only condition is that I have a flatmate, another lady preferably -- we would also have a housekeeper, of course, and would have to keep orgies to a minimum of three per week and never on Sundays --”

Edith bursts out laughing and she thinks her heart might have burst already.

“Of course I want to,” Edith says. “Of course I do, of course!”

“I’ve never seen you so happy,” Lavinia says before she closes the space between them and embraces her tightly, clutching Edith’s shoulders and pressing her cheek against Edith’s. Edith fumbles and puts her arms around Lavinia, who always seems so slight and is, actually, beneath her nightgown, even thinner, but there’s a vitality there that seeps into Edith’s skin and makes everything possible.

“I thought for a second, _Perhaps I’ll ask Mary_ ,” Lavinia says, and that deflates Edith for all of a few seconds. Edith pulls away a little to look at Lavinia’s face, and she’s all serious again. “But it’s you, Edith. Us. Mary doesn’t want what we want, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We just want something different, that’s all.”

Another Edith, before the war, Edith who lurked in chairs and corners watching Mary jealously all their lives, would have agreed with a sneer on her upper lip and rolled her eyes at poor little Mary and all the aspirations their family has for her.

That was before the war when Edith was still so young.

“She isn’t like us,” Edith agrees. “There’s only two years between us, but that made all the difference, for some reason. Mary wants to be a great lady, like our mother and Granny --”

“And we will be like your Aunt Rosamund,” Lavinia laughs.

“Perhaps with less plotting against the young people our nieces and nephews bring home,” Edith adds. “But plotting won’t be eliminated all together, because what else are aunts for?”

“Yes, we will need _some_ meddling on weekends when we’re not dancing.”

“Stay here for the night,” Edith says. She gets out of bed and goes to her modest dresser where she has that day’s newspaper folded and tucked behind her jewelry box. “I suppose Anna forgot to take this when we dressed for dinner. All the better, as we can see what type of work the city requires.”

“We could join a literary circle or start one of our own!” Lavinia says as she brings the rest of her body under the blankets and watches Edith spread the newspaper out on her comforter. Edith sits up and opens the advertisements; as she smooths out the crinkles in the page, Lavinia leans her head against Edith’s shoulder and reads from there. “I feel so much lighter now, so much more _me_. That weight of _Matthew_ and thirty servants and _the family name_ \-- those are all good things, but they’re not the right things. They’re not the right things for me.”

“How do you do,” Edith says as she reads the tiny print on the page. “I am Edith Crawley, and this is Lavinia Swire. Yes, we share a flat in the second or third most fashionable neighbourhood in London -- not too rich, but not too dangerous. By day, we are _insert occupations here_. By evening, we volunteer for any number of noble causes, have our literary circle, and dance with handsome young men no less than three times per week.”

“I can hardly bear it,” Lavinia sighs. “How happy we’ll be, Edith.”

“How proud of ourselves,” Edith adds. She turns a little to look at Lavinia’s profile, her head still resting on her shoulder. Like this, it seems easier to bare her soul, as she never wanted to do with two nosy sisters who would take any chance to run and tell their parents or Granny (even Sybil, who seems to have forgotten what a spiteful little girl she was before she was canonised). “The war was awful, but I felt like... I wasn’t a waste of a person anymore.”

“Oh, Edith.”

“It’s true. I wasn’t sitting around the house, attending flower shows, having my hair curled and dresses made, snooping through Mary’s letters and diaries for gossip no one would tell me.”

“That’s all right, Edith.” Lavinia took Edith’s hand again and clasped it tight, then stroked a reassuring hand up and down the length of Edith’s arm. “Things are going to change now, I can feel it.”

**Author's Note:**

> Quietly had Colin Hay's "Waiting for My Real Life to Begin" playing in my head as I wrote this, if you'd like a soundtrack to this story.


End file.
